Hawaii’s Mountains – Here’s a link to the live web cam on the summit of near 13,800
foot Mauna Keaon the Big Island of Hawaii. This web cam is available during the daylight
hours here in the islands…and when there’s a big moon shining down during the night at times.
Plus, during the nights you will be able to see stars, and the sunrise and sunset too…depending
upon weather conditions. Here’s the Haleakala Crater webcam on Maui – if it’s working.

Tropical Cyclone activity in the eastern and central Pacific- Here’s the latest weather
information coming out of theNational Hurricane Center, covering the eastern north Pacific.
You can find the latest tropical cyclone information for the central north Pacific (where Hawaii is located)
by clicking on this link to the Central Pacific Hurricane Center. A satellite image, which shows the
entire ocean area between Hawaii and the Mexican coast…can be found here. The 2012 hurricane
season is over in the eastern and central Pacific…resuming on May 15th and June 1st 2013.

Aloha Paragraphs

Trade winds…off and on windward showers

Small Craft Wind Advisory…statewide

The following numbers represent the most recent top wind gusts (mph), along with directions
as of Thursday evening:

The trade winds will remain active through Friday night, then falter and shift to the southeast. Here’s a weather chart showing a near 1038 millibar high pressure system, located far to the northeast of the islands. This high pressure cell has an associated ridge of high pressure extending to the north of the islands. The trades will stick around through Friday night, and then shift to the southeast during the day Saturday, and perhaps locally south by Sunday near Kauai…as the next late season cold front approaches Hawaii. We will likely see another episode of vog during the weekend, until the trade winds return again next week.

Satellite imagery shows generally clear to partly cloudy skies over and around the islands, with an expected increase in windward showers tonight into Friday morning. As the trade winds continue to
blow over the islands through Friday night…we’ll see off and on showers falling along our windward sides. The leeward sides will remain mostly clear to partly cloudy…as generally dry weather prevails along those south and west facing beaches. As the winds falter Saturday, the interior sections of the islands will find clouds gathering, with some showers falling. Precipitation will be most notable over the Kauai end of the island chain, until the cold front arrives later Sunday into next Monday.

A trade wind weather pattern will prevail through Friday night.The trades will remain quite breezy, peaking in strength into Friday. The computer models continue to suggest that the trade flow will ease up Saturday, with south to southeast winds taking over…and more voggy weather slated for the weekend in many areas. This will be caused by the approach of our next cold front, which will bring showers into next Monday or Tuesday. Some of the computer models are showing the cold front stalling over Kauai or Oahu, while others show it halting over Maui County. We certainly remember this past weekend’s cold front coming to a stop…before delivering rainfall to Maui County and the Big Island both. At this point, it’s still a question, although personally, as we head towards our long dry summer months, I’d prefer this front to bring precipitation into the state as far as possible! I’ll have more information about this in my new weather narrative early Friday morning. ~~~ I hope you have a great Thursday night wherever you’re spending it! Aloha for now…Glenn.

Interesting:Applying a maxim from computer science to biology raises the intriguing possibility that life existed before Earth did, and may have originated outside our solar system, scientists say.Moore’s Law is the observation that computers increase exponentially in complexity, at a rate of about double the transistors per integrated circuit every very two years.

If you apply Moore’s Law to just the last few years’ rate of computational complexity and work backward, you’ll get back to the 1960s, when the first microchip was, indeed, invented. Now, two geneticists have applied Moore’s Law to the rate at which life on Earth grows in complexity — and the results suggest organic life first came into existence long before Earth itself.

Staff Scientist Alexei Sharov of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, and Theoretical Biologist Richard Gordon of the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida, took Moore’s Law, replaced the transistors with nucleotides — the building blocks of DNA and RNA — and the circuits with genetic material, and did the math.

The results suggest life first appeared about 10 billion years ago, far older than the Earth’s projected age of 4.5 billion years. So even if it’s mathematically possible for life to have existed before Earth did, is it physically possible? Again, Sharov and Gordon said yes, it is.

As our solar system was forming, pre-existing bacterialike organisms, or even simple nucleotides from an older part of the galaxy, could have reached Earth by hitching an interstellar ride on comets, asteroids or other inorganic space debris — a theoretical process called panspermia.

The scientists’ calculations are not scientific proof that life predates Earth — there’s no way of knowing for sure that organic complexity increased at a steady rate at any point in the universe’s history.

Call it a thought exercise or an essay, rather than a theory, Sharov said. “There are lots of hypothetical elements to (our argument)… but to make a wider view, you need some hypothetical elements,” Sharov told TechNewsDaily.

Sharov and Gordon’s idea raises other intriguing possibilities. For one, “life before Earth” debunks the long-held science-fiction trope of the scientifically advanced alien species. If genetic complexity progresses at a steady rate, then the social and scientific development of any other alien life form in the Milky Way galaxy would be roughly equivalent to those of humans.

Sharov and Gordon’s study draws a theoretical and practical parallel between the origin of life and the relationship between life and knowledge. Human evolution doesn’t just occur in the genome; it occurs epigenetically, or within the mind, as technology, language and cultural memory all become more complex.

“The functional complexity of organisms (is) encoded partially in the heritable genome and partially in the perishable mind,” they explain in the paper. By applying Moore’s Law — a theory originally devised to explain technological development — to life, the geneticists aren’t simplifying evolution; they’re acknowledging its extraordinary complexity, they say.

Although some may be skeptical of Sharov and Gordon’s findings, the scientists stand by their conclusions. “Contamination with bacterial spores from space appears the most plausible hypothesis that explains the early appearance of life on Earth,” they argue in the paper, which is published online in the preprint journal Arxiv.

Sharov said that if he had to bet on it, he’d say “it’s 99 percent true that life started before Earth — but we should leave 1 percent for some wild chance that we haven’t accounted for.”